Nancy Lemann at Harper’s Magazine:

Even the warthogs in Botswana are incredibly charming. Everything is very distinct and pure. The Okavango Delta is an alluvial plain, sort of like a Louisiana swamp but with incredibly non-humid clear air. Especially compared to the camp on the Zambezi River, which was foreboding, with elephants constantly crushing the dry gnarled branches.

The elephants are in a great mood in Botswana. Because they’re in the Garden of Eden. You drive out in a Land Cruiser that can go on any kind of terrain, including water. I had wondered how the game drives in this place could be done with all the water everywhere. You just constantly plunge into water and drive through.

In the evening we saw the most entrancing lioness and her cubs. The lioness was so dignified and elegant; her mischievous and adorable cubs frolicked nearby. She was plainly exhausted, relaxing on the Edenic plain, but also alert and watchful of them in a resigned and noble way through her exhaustion.

more here.

Merve Emre at The New Yorker:

Susan Taubes’s novel “Divorcing” (1969) begins with a report in France-Soir of a femme décapitée, a woman whose head was cut clean off when she was hit by a car in the Eighteenth Arrondissement of Paris. The woman, Sophie Blind, is, like Taubes, the daughter of a psychoanalyst, the granddaughter of a rabbi, and the estranged wife of a scholar and a rabbi. She is also the mother of mostly male children, and the lover of Gaston, Roland, Alain, Nicholas, and Ivan. In flight from her married life in New York, she has just moved to Paris with her children. She is killed before she has a chance to finish arranging the furniture in her new apartment.

In life, Sophie’s mind and her body were beholden to men. In death, her severed head is free to wander backward through her life in a series of surreal images. Her head can detach from the first-person point of view and float into omniscience. It can leap across time and space: to her marriage in New York, to her melancholy childhood in Budapest.

more here.

Valero and Tollefson in Nature:

Climate science will get its day in court this week as lawyers for Rikki Held and 15 other young people argue that the state of Montana’s environmental policies promote fossil fuels, in violation of their right to a ‘clean and healthful environment’. That right is enshrined in the state’s constitution, making the climate case — Held v. Montana — the first of its kind to go to trial in the United States, and the latest example of frustrated citizens worldwide taking legal action to force their governments to act on climate change.

Numerous climate lawsuits have been filed in the United States, targeting everything from government energy policies to businesses for their responsibility to pay for damages from climate pollution. In the lawsuit against Montana, a large producer of oil, gas and coal, the plaintiffs argue that the state’s long-standing support of fossil fuels violates their fundamental rights under the state constitution. Climate science will feature prominently during the trial, as Kathy Seeley, a Montana judge, seeks to determine whether the state’s policies are “a substantial factor” in driving climate impacts such as droughts, wildfires and extreme weather.

“This is what I expect will be the battle of the experts,” says Michael Burger, executive director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law in New York City. In particular, Burger thinks that witnesses will use the field of climate-attribution science — which seeks to quantify climate change’s impact on specific weather and climate events — to bolster the youths’ case.

More here.

Gina Kolata in The New York Times:

On Nov. 30 last year, OpenAI released the first free version of ChatGPT. Within 72 hours, doctors were using the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot. “I was excited and amazed but, to be honest, a little bit alarmed,” said Peter Lee, the corporate vice president for research and incubations at Microsoft, which invested in OpenAI. He and other experts expected that ChatGPT and other A.I.-driven large language models could take over mundane tasks that eat up hours of doctors’ time and contribute to burnout, like writing appeals to health insurers or summarizing patient notes. They worried, though, that artificial intelligence also offered a perhaps too tempting shortcut to finding diagnoses and medical information that may be incorrect or even fabricated, a frightening prospect in a field like medicine.

Most surprising to Dr. Lee, though, was a use he had not anticipated — doctors were asking ChatGPT to help them communicate with patients in a more compassionate way. In one survey, 85 percent of patients reported that a doctor’s compassion was more important than waiting time or cost. In another survey, nearly three-quarters of respondents said they had gone to doctors who were not compassionate. And a study of doctors’ conversations with the families of dying patients found that many were not empathetic. Enter chatbots, which doctors are using to find words to break bad news and express concerns about a patient’s suffering, or to just more clearly explain medical recommendations.

More here.

Driving Back with Robert

He’s looking for an image of eternity –
remembering long boyhood summer days
of repetitive farm work – maybe mowing,
going back and forth across the hayfield
humming above the warm machinery clatter
in the August light.  Time was so huge
then.  It could not fail.  “But that’s not it,”
he says and turns his face to the window
to think again –
……………………… but now I’m six years old,
riding beside Big Ted in a truck pulling
a mower across acres of field on either side
of the driveway that swept down to the road
from the big house where my father
was chauffeur.  On the high lawns, a row
of summer gardeners scour the lawn of every
weed on their knees like scrub ladies, but
Big Ted and I rattle and clunk all day in a
suspensionless pickup, I dozing a kind of
jolting in and out doze, up and in and under
and up like a flying fish on a sea, such a vast
sea, such a long day, back and forth, back
and forth, endless, endless, endless.

by Nils Peterson

Rachel Lu in Law and Liberty:

J.K. Rowling is not a witch. She acquitted herself well in her recent “trial,” by which I mean the podcast series hosted by The Free Press, detailing the explosive controversy between history’s most famous children’s author and liberal progressive activists. It’s cleverly titled The Witch Trials, and it tells the story of Rowling’s rise to fame and her fall into (progressive) infamy. There is extended interview material from Rowling herself, along with some contributions from her detractors and critics. I should warn readers that this is the sort of podcast I had to turn off whenever my kids climbed into the car. Rowling’s battle with transgender ideologues has been exceedingly ugly, and the series makes no effort to sugar-coat this. Nevertheless, the whole story left me oddly hopeful.

More here.

Mariana Lenharo in Nature:

Adam Mastroianni was always bothered by anecdotal claims that people are becoming less kind, respectful and trustworthy over time. So he took a deep dive into such claims: he wrote a PhD dissertation.

Now Mastroianni and a collaborator have drawn on decades’ worth of survey results and other data to find that people around the world have perceived a general moral decline for at least the past 70 years¹. But the data also show that individuals’ evaluation of their contemporaries’ morality has remained largely unchanged during that time. Mastroianni, a psychologist at Columbia University in New York City, and his co-author Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, conclude that the perception of moral decline is an illusion.

More here.

Lawrence Weschler in Wondercabinet:

I’ve recently been corresponding with the erudite, recondite and just plain delightful arts writer Morgan Meis, initially about our mutual passion for Vermeer, but more latterly about his specific passion for Franz Marc, and in particular for Marc’s astonishingly powerful and powerfully prophetic 1913 painting The Fate of the Animals (below), the title as well, as it happens, of Meis’s own superb monograph on same.

In the words of that book’s jacket copy, “In 1913, Franz Marc, one of the key figures of German Expressionism, created a masterpiece, The Fate of the Animals. With its violent slashes of color and line, the painting seemed to prefigure both the outbreak of World War I and, more eerily, Marc’s own death in an artillery barrage at the Battle of Verdun three years later.”

And Meis’s book takes off from there. I am somewhat ashamed to admit how till reading the book I had never spent any particular amount of time thinking about that painting, or even that much time thinking about Franz Marc—a state of affairs that in the mean-between has now been decisively upended (I can hardly wait to make it over to Basel to see the painting in person and in the flesh, as it were).

More here.

Matt Hrodey in Discover Magazine:

A new study estimates the weight of New York City’s buildings at 1.68 trillion pounds and says that, little by little, they’re sinking into the ground. The Big Apple could ultimately share the same fate as Venice, which is slipping into the Mediterranean Sea at a similar rate. Or it could see a reprise of 2012’s Hurricane Sandy, during which ocean water flooded the city. Compounding the problem for both Venice and New York City is that the two cities will sink into rising waters – scientists expect sea levels to rise 20 to 60 centimeters by 2050. The math starts to look dire for lower Manhattan – the area rests 1 to 2 meters above sea level and is currently sinking at a rate of 1 to 4 millimeters. While the paper stops short of predicting when New York City will dip below sea level, it could happen in a matter of decades.

Much of Manhattan was built on sand and clay and “artificial fill,” which also means garbage and other material. The soils of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island also contain large amounts of fill, which seems to accelerate the sinking.

New York City’s decline may be due to the weight of its 1.08 million buildings, the study says.

More here.

Jennifer Couzin-Frankel in Science:

On a chilly holiday Monday in January 2020, a medical milestone passed largely unnoticed. In a New York City operating room, surgeons gently removed the heart from a 43-year-old man who had died and shuttled it steps away to a patient in desperate need of a new one.

More than 3500 people in the United States receive a new heart each year. But this case was different—the first of its kind in the country. “It took us 6 months to prepare,” says Nader Moazami, surgical head of heart transplantation at New York University (NYU) Langone Health, where the operation took place. The run-up included oversight from an ethics board, education sessions with nurses and anesthesiologists, and lengthy conversations with the local organization that represents organ donor families. Physicians spent hours practicing in the hospital’s cadaver lab, prepping for organ recovery from the donor. “We wanted to make sure that we controlled every aspect,” Moazami says.

That’s because this donor, unlike most, was not declared dead because of loss of brain function. He had been suffering from end-stage liver disease and was comatose and on a ventilator, with no hope of regaining consciousness—but his brain still showed activity. His family made the wrenching choice to remove life support. Following that decision, they expressed a wish to donate his organs, even agreeing to transfer him to NYU Langone Health before he died so his heart could be recovered afterward.

More here.

Licking the Dew off Roses

(for Laurie Lee and his daughter Jessy)

When she woke, at six in the morning,
gurgling, he’d creep silent from his
warm bed to lay her gently on a shawl.

Always the same way round they’d walk
the garden, listening to the peonies
and poppies open. He had never heard them

stretch and squeak until he walked
with her safe in his arms, laughing,
as she leaned to lick the dew off roses.

Even now she remembers frosty mornings
wrapped in a rough blanket, his flat vowels
curling in a tobacco tang, the stubble of his chin.

Oh why did you never walk with me, Daddy,
safe in your arms, under a waxing moon,
so  I too could lick the dew off roses?

by Sue Hubbard
from Everything Begins with the Skin
Enitharmon Press, London, 1994

Kitty Empire at The Guardian:

When the cult singer-songwriter Nick Drake’s third album, Pink Moon, was released in 1972 many of his friends were horrified. Now held to be a stone-cold classic, it is a spare, beautiful sequence of songs, many of which lay bare its 24-year-old author’s inner tumult. Drake’s two previous albums, Five Leaves Left (1969) and Bryter Layter (1971), had sold poorly. Although he was an English singer-guitarist whose unconventional tunings and numinous lyrics set him apart, even in a crowded folk revival field, a chasm had opened up between the promise of his talent and his meagre public profile.

Now, Drake is revered as a depressed romantic too fragile for the world. The Cure took their name from one of his songs. In the 80s, artists as diverse as Kate Bush and the Dream Academy cited him as an influence. Volkswagen used Pink Moon’s title track in an ad in 1999, prompting a fresh upsurge of interest in his oblique pastorals.

more here.

Emily Hart at the New York Times:

A spaceship lands near a small town in the Amazon, leaving the local government to manage an alien invasion. Dissidents who disappeared during a military dictatorship return years later as zombies. Bodies suddenly begin to fuse upon physical contact, forcing Colombians to navigate newly dangerous salsa bars and FARC guerrillas who have merged with tropical birds.

Across Latin America, shelves labeled “ciencia ficción,” or science fiction, have long been filled with translations of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson and H.G. Wells. Now they might have to compete with a new wave of Latin American writers who are making the genre their own, rerooting it in their homelands and histories. Shrugging off rolling cornfields and New York skylines, they set their stories against the dense Amazon, craggy Andean mountainscapes and unmistakably Latin American urban sprawl.

more here.

Dave Granlund in ArcaMax:

More here.

Pandora Dewan in Newsweek:

A common nutrient found in everyday foods might be the key to a long and healthy life, according to researchers from Columbia University. The nutrient in question is taurine, a naturally occurring amino acid with a range of essential roles around the body. Not only does the concentration of this nutrient in our bodies decrease as we age, but supplementation can increase lifespan by up to 12 percent in different species. Our main dietary sources of taurine are animal proteins, such as meat, fish and dairy, although it can also be found in some seaweeds and artificially supplemented energy drinks. It can also be produced inside the body from other amino acids. In a study published in the journal Science, a team of researchers from around the world looked at the effects of this nutrient on health and lifespan. “This study suggests that taurine could be an elixir of life within us that helps us live longer and healthier lives,” Vijay Yadav, one of the leading authors of the study, said in a statement.

Yadav, assistant professor of genetics and development at Columbia University Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, first discovered the importance of taurine while researching osteoporosis, uncovering the nutrient’s essential role in regulating bone growth. Similar studies have also shown that taurine can benefit immune function, obesity and the nervous system. “We realized that if taurine is regulating all these processes that decline with age, maybe taurine levels in the bloodstream affect overall health and lifespan,” Yadav said.

More here. (Note: Congratulations to Dr. Abdullah Ali from my lab, a co-author on this Science article)